1. Fields of the Invention
The present invention relates to keyword searching. More particularly, the present invention relates to customizing search engine results.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Search engines have become the dominant way to access information on the Internet, providing ease of use and accurate results. Typically, search results generated from a search engine comprise a list of URLs (Uniform Resource Locator) of web sites. However, there are many occasions when the web sites that a user is interested in are scattered throughout the results. Often the results of interest do not appear on the first page but in subsequent result pages. This behavior may disappoint a user, if the user wishes to distribute the search results to other users (or perhaps store the search query string in a document). The Google™ Similar Pages feature serves only to find similar documents and does not provide accurate documents.
For example, when a user clicks on the “Similar Pages” link for a search result Google™ automatically bring web pages that are related to this result. The Similar Pages feature can be used for many purposes. If a user likes a particular site's content, but wish it had more, Similar Pages can find sites with similar content with which the user may be unfamiliar. If a user is looking for product information, Similar Pages can find competitive information so the user can make direct comparisons. If a user is interested in researching a particular field, Similar Pages can help the user find a large number of resources very quickly, without having to worry about selecting the right keywords.
However, the more specialized a page is, the fewer results the existing search engines can find for a user. For example, the Similar Pages feature of Google™ may not be able to find related pages for a personal home page, if it does not have enough information to associate other pages with it. Also, if companies use multiple URLs for their pages (such as company.com and www.company.com), Similar Pages may have little information on one URL, but lots on the other.
Therefore, it would be desirable to have a search engine and a method for providing more accurate search result documents.